Only the Beginning

Reflections on the world around me.

Red Moons
Face each other
On a landscape dug so many times

Red Moons multiply

As silver
Cuts into tilled land
In the shadows of a drive

Let red moons gloss
‘Til only silver shines

Rebirth After Phillis Wheatley
Burning sand does turn to ice when warmer
Day meets with night, subtle light transformer.
Sky holding suns, with the wind wonder blew,
To find a long gone song of times anew.
From salted sprays of seas to mountain range
Land grows and falls beneath with steady change.
Steps carry across the grain where dancers
Fell upon their legs, ring voice of chanters
Who find no ear to lay their claims of love.
Once wingless birds now find their flight above
In sky, once so broken, has at last healed.
Scurry small mice who now revel in field
Filled with decay as rain do wash away.
No mourners stand when all have disobeyed
Green returns to stolen, concrete covered.
Bursting spring cause gray world to recolor

Little secrets hidden
In whining winds and breezes
Roses flower for one reason
As rains begin to break
Upon the sweetest sunshine
Laughter not too far away

Words
Always running
Even when I think of
Nothing

Words never ending
Forever sending
Never said

Words lost
Words found

Words
Just lines
Just sounds
My way of
Being

Present After Amanda Gorman
We have turned our backs
We quit the fight
Intimidated by this plight
We know that as we sit
The storm thickens
And those who come next will never know
What it feels to have snow settle where our dirty steps are left
We pretend not to notice these cold winds that sting our faces
We make no changes
The storm continues to grow
Our gift to them will be all we know

Swallow
A bird. From beak to tail
A bright shiny blue

Cappuccino in hand
Turning stools
By big windows
Cars driving by

I await your arrival

So I may leave
To hide more than I speak
To comeback next week
Little bird on the door
Welcome me

The big wide blue
Sandy structures crumbling
With waters touch

Too cold

Wade in
Dive beneath
Tides pull gently at my feet

Cold feels warmer
Where waves collide

On the horizon
The line between
Sea and sky
The end of sight
Only the beginning

Process

I have been inspired by everything around me, from painful memories to the beauty of this world. Many of my poems start as word-for-word tellings and descriptions. Then I spend days rewriting the poem removing the facts, turning it abstract. Much of what I use to replace these descriptions is nature. I find nature very beautiful and it can bring serenity to moments that would otherwise be horrible. For example, Red Moons is based on a memory in which I saw someone cut into their arms with a nailclipper. That memory terrifies me however once I put it into writing and took away the exact descriptions of what I saw the memory became somewhat more hopeful.

Another two of my poems, Rebirth and Present, were created using Amanda Gorman and Phillis Wheatley’s work as guidelines for my own. With Rebirth I’d read Phillis Wheatley’s, A Hymn to the Evening, and followed her syllable structure with ten syllables per line and rhyming scheme of a rhyme at the end of every line. For Present, I took a small section of Amanda Gorman’s The Hill We Climb and tried to adopt her tone in which she begins defiant and then explains why we must be defiant then Gorman showed how if we try our hardest good will come and we can pass that on. I made my poem more hopeless than hers while using similar words and sentence structure. Originally this was a school assignment but I loved what I had written and didn’t want it to be hidden away in my school files.